BUSINESS PHONE NEWS

Will Auto-Renewal of Bad Voice & Data Contracts Drag You Over Your Own Telecom Fiscal Cliff in 2013?

By Dan Baldwin, Editor
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As Washington wrangles over the details of avoiding a national "fiscal cliff", business owners and managers should take a day or two to find the fiscal cliffs buried in their current telecom agreements.

Just as the nation's taxpayers want their Washington political representatives to eliminate spending on overpriced or underutilized services, so too should every business be scrutinizing the details of every contract  for voice and data services that generates a monthly invoice.

 

Auto-Renewal = Going Over the Telecom Cliff

I've been in the telecom business since 1990 and the only rates that I've ever seen go up year after year are copper phone line rates from AT&T and Verizon. All other rates on all other services have gone down every year for over 20 years.

The reason telecom carriers write their contracts so they auto-renew at the end of a term is to prevent their customers from asking for lower rates.  If you do not notify your telecom carriers that it is your intention to review and renegotiate each and every agreement prior to the expiration of the term you are locking in lower business profits for yourself and giving your telecom vendor higher profits without your vendor giving you more value in return.

 

How to Renegotiate Your Telecom Contracts Without Switching Voice & Data Carriers

The main reason most business customers let their contracts auto-renew is because they simply don't have the time, energy or resources to conduct a thorough market analysis of their current vendor's competition and they really don't want to change providers anyway.

While an aversion to switching carriers is understandable since that's when major outages can occur, an aversion to saving 10% on a voice or data phone bill is hard to understand, especially since it can be accomplished without switching service providers if a professional network services "independent partner" is engaged for a contract renewal consulting agreement.

The trick to successfully negotiating a lower contract rate from your existing provider is in being able to convince your current provider that you can easily access the same or better service at a lower rate from one of their competitors. Unfortunately, getting competitive contract pricing information from your current carrier's competitors (that you have no real intention of switching to) can be tough. This is where an independent sales consultant is invaluable.

Independent telecom agents or "channel partners" work with all the different voice and data competitors and are very familiar with the most aggressive pricing that all the vendors provide to retail customers in any given competitive scenario. More often than not, an independent sales consultant can provide the exact documentation you need to get your current provider to lower your current rates IF and ONLY IF you've not let your agreement auto-renew.

 

How Can You Get Contract Renegotiation Help? Call Us!

Click here to find a recommended telecom agent or independent network services sales partner in your area.  All agents and partners help customers in different ways and at different price points. Some charge a straight hourly rate, some charge a "shared savings" percentage and others simply charge a "management over-ride" percentage of all the monthly invoices they help you manage.

To find the right partner for your renegotiation needs you'll want to work with someone that understands your specific network voice and data design so that competitive comparisons are done in an "apples for apples" manner.

 

Keywords: independent telecom agent, sales partner, network services, contract, service agreement, renegotiation, shared savings, auto-renewal, at&t, verizon, cliff, telecom fiscal, Image: iStock

Will an $8 "Dual Persona" App Enable Employees to Securely Use Their Personal Smartphones for Work?

By Dan Baldwin, Editor
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I recently attended a seminar put on by Verizon titled "The State of Mobility" which was promoted as an opportunity to meet Verizon's enterprise mobility experts and hear them speak on the current and future state of mobility strategy as well as an overview of Verizon's "Enterprise Mobility as a Service" ("eMaaS") solution.

The two -hour session began with Ed Branham and Forrest Carr covering the difficult questions CIOs and IT managers were struggling with as they attempt to decide about incorporating MDM ("mobile device management") into their enterprise operations including:

1. Should we even allow BYOD ("bring your own device") where employees use their personal smartphones and tablets to access required corporate mobility applications?
2. How do we create a reasonable MDM/BYOD policy that properly balances application access and corporate control?
3. Which MDM software solution should we implement to control mobile devices and application access? 
4. How do we make sure our data stays secure?

The session was too short to detail many answers but as the CIOs and IT managers in the seminar audience were all within shouting distance of their Verizon account executive, one could assume that Verizon is ready to have their enterprise mobility account teams solve any mobility problem a customer could envision.

 

$8 Per Month Per Employee to Instantly Resolve all MDM/BYOD Issues for any Company?

The second half of the seminar delivered the easy answer for anyone looking for an off the shelf solution they could throw at their MDM/BYOD problems today as Steven Baker and Tom Thimot presented Verizon's "Enterprise Mobility as a Service" or "eMaaS" solution.

According to the presentation, Verizon's eMaaS solution starts with device and expense management with a web-based portal that allows enterprise businesses to track all their mobile endpoint devices and make sure they're not overpaying for minutes and bandwidth. The presentation claimed that the software was "vendor agnostic" and using all Verizon Wireless cell phones was not required.

The presenters freely admitted that plenty of competitors like BoxTone, AirWatch and MobileIron existed that do MDM/BYOD but then they segued into Verizon's incorporation of a "Dual Persona" mobility solution which would solve the CIO & IT manager's MDM/BYOD problems and forever eliminate the need for any employee to ever again carry two cell phones - one for business use and one for personal use.

 

What's Dual Persona and Will Employees Trust it on Their Personal Smartphones?

"Dual Persona" refers to a mobile device application that allows a single smartphone to primarily be a personal cell phone but when the dual persona app is activated it turns the phone into a corporate smartphone that is VPNed into all the corporate mobility apps that the employee needs to do his or her job and is "fire walled" safely from the personal apps and data on the same smartphone.

Click here or the video below to view a 3-minute demonstration of the Divide dual persona smartphone application by EnterProid that Verizon has co-oped into their eMaaS solution. Click here to view a 1-minute Divide corporate promo video.

 

Pretty cool, huh?  Who wouldn't want that on their phone? It's the MDM/BYOD answer, right?  With the right dual persona app, every corporation can have a pretty simple MDM/BYOD policy like:

1. To work here you must have (and pay for) your own smartphone.
2. You must download and install this dual persona app and then manage it properly.
3. Don't worry, we won't we won't keep track of how much time you spend fooling around with your personal app during work hours (even though we can)

Now I've not discussed with any CIOs or IT managers how much this dual persona app has solved all their MDM/BYOD problems - but for lack of having a cheaper place to start - Verizon's eMaaS seems like an inexpensive place to start. Verizon's retail price point for their whole eMaas solution which includes the Divide dual persona app is $8 per month per employee.

 

Will Verizon Win the MDM/BYOD War on Price and User Self-Management?

The presenters went out of their way to reinforce the fact that Verizon's solution price is per employee where as all their MDM/BYOD competitors charge per device. It was at this point that Steven Baker pulled out all four of his mobile devices (a Blackberry, an Android, an iPad and a laptop computer) and said Verizon's eMaaS solution covered all these devices for one low price.

How Does Verizon's New Unlimited Voice/Text and Shared Data Plan Change Your Phone Bill Budget?

By Dan Baldwin, Editor
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Finally. One of the biggest phone companies on the planet did something that will make the life of a business owner a little easier -- or did they?

Click here to read the Verizon Wireless press release that states that they are eliminating all their different "buckets of minutes" rate plans in favor of just letting all their customers talk and text all they like for one flat monthly price.

"All you can eat" talk and text. That's gotta be a good thing, right?

If all your employees do is talk and text a lot this new plan certainly is good. Except your employees don't just "talk and text". What they seem to be doing mostly these days is "apping" it up with every data drinking phone app they can figure our how to download onto their phones.

"Cha Ching" (That's the sound of you paying for your employees' mobile data usage through Verizon's new "shared data" pricing -- which is the other half of their new pricing package.)

 

Will Your Business Wireless Phone Bill Go Up or Down?  Yes...

In effect, Verizon simply held up a mirror to its old pricing package and said, "This is the new package". Where they used to have unlimited data and metered voice and text, now they have metered data and unlimited voice and text.

To learn how this will affect business wireless phone bills I called two people I know that run business wireless expense monitoring and management companies, Moe Arnaiz from eMobus out of San Diego and Josh Lipton from Advantix out of Texas.

US Soldier Gets $16,000 Wireless Phone Bill for Data Roaming -- Is Your Phone Bill Properly Protected?

By Dan Baldwin, Editor
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 This story from California about a US service man getting a $16,098 phone bill from his wireless cell phone company got me thinking on three different levels.

First, I thought that could easily happen to my phone bill since I have two sons about the same age as the US soldier in the story who both use their cell phones for just about everything you can think of except talking.

Second, what was the guy really doing with his phone that jacked the bill up so high and do I or any of my employees do the same thing?

Third, are there any safety measures set up on my own business wireless cell phone accounts (I use Verizon for seven business cell phones) to prevent the same sort of "bill shock" from showing up in my mailbox next month.

 

How Much Data Does the Average Employee Use or Need Every Month?

Surprisingly little I think. I honestly had no idea (nor did I seem to think I needed to care) since I still had Verizon's "unlimited" data plan on most of my businesses smart phones.

After printing out the summary pages of my business cell phone bill for the last four months I discovered that for seven business cell phones the total was under five gigs of data per month total. The range was quite large though as my own personal data use was under 200 megs a month (just 20% of one gig) while my oldest employee (over 70 years old) used seven times what I used at 1.4 gigs.

(It took me a while to discover what "business use" a desk bound 70-year old employee would have for 1.4 gigs of data usage per month. We narrowed it down to either streaming Pandora radio for several hours per day and/or the Scrabble dictionary app.)

I was somewhat relieved to discover though that even the most data hungry power users I knew (all three of my teenage kids and even my brother-in-law who's always video-Skyping his kids from the road) used under 2 gigs a month each - a lot of data but certainly manageable - I think (right?)

 

How Do You Create a $16,098 Cell Phone Bill?

So now that I've got a handle on my own business cell phone and data usage I go back to thinking, "How'd this poor US serviceman jack up his cell phone bill to over $16,000?"  Well if you read the story, it turns out the guy used 1.6 gigs of data in just six days while on leave visiting his parents.

New FCC Smartphone Database Cuts Thefts in Six Months But We help You Today

By Dan Baldwin, Editor
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 The FCC is announcing that they have decided to partner with the likes of AT&T, Verizon, Sprint, t-mobile and other wireless carriers to create a national database to help thwart the theft of smartphones by making them all but unsellable after a theft.

Uh ... that's good, right?  

Sure it is when the newest smartphones cost upwards of $500 or more. 

But the real cost of smartphone loss is the loss of the data ... and the person stealing your phone may be only after the data ... and the new FCC smartphone database won't do anything to prevent a thief from stealing your phone if all they want is to steal your data.

 

Don't Wait for the Feds!  Here's How to Secure Your Phone Right Now...

1. Put a password on your phone.

Sure it's a hassle to type in the name of your Aunt's dog into your phone several times a day.  But how much more trouble would it be for your friends, relatives, enemies, competitors or the government to be able to access everything on your phone from the moment they "find" it until the moment you realize it's gone?

2. Make sure whatever's on your phone is already in the cloud.

Remember this Google+ commercial from awhile back about the dad who lost all his baby pictures because he lost his cell phone? Your phone (and your desktop computer for that matter) is not meant to be a secure storage device. It's meant to be a simple endpoint to collect data and then get it instantly to a safer place.

3. Use software that "finds your phone or fries your phone"

For as little as three bucks or as much as twenty bucks you can access any number of smartphone applications that can do as little as find a lost phone in vibrate mode, turn a phone into a coldwar-type spy device and/or turn your phone into a useless plastic brick.  GadgetTrak, SeekDroid and Webroot are just three of multiple companies that specialize in giving you control over lost phones.

Is Your AT&T Phone Bill Paying for $107,000 Per Year Call Center Reps?

By Dan Baldwin, Editor
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When it comes to how business customers feel about having AT&T as their phone company -- it seems that they fall into one of two categories.

They either love AT&T or they hate AT&T.

In the news this past week I learned another reason it might be the "hate" category.  It seems that AT&T phone customers are supporting call center representatives that earn a total "wages and benefits" compensation package of over $107,000.

Network technicians, the folks who show up and install services on site at your business earn a compensation package eclipsing $133,000.

Wow! That's a lot of money. I've got friends with college degrees and every Microsoft and Cisco certification you can name who are unemployed and who would be happy to get a job earning half that.

 

Over Paying AT&T or Verizon for Phone, Internet and Data Service?

Now I'm not saying that people shouldn't get paid what they're worth but hey, business customers have choices.

When I fly, I fly economy, even though I know I could pay double (or more) to fly up front in the first class section. But after a five-hour flight coast-to-coast, the good folks flying in first class only get off the plane about four minutes before I do.

How Can Enterprises Safely Migrate Away from Blackberry to iPhones, Android & iPads? A Subject Matter Expert Interview

By Dan Baldwin, Editor
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Blackberry outages have been well documented over the past several months as has been the outcry of unhappy Blackberry enterprise business customers.  The obvious questions begged by these headlines include:

What's preventing Blackberry customers from moving to the iPhone or the Android platform?

Does Blackberry have a monopoly on enterprise-class mobile security?

What does a migration strategy away from Blackberry look like?

To help answer these questions, and understand the related issues, I recently spoke with Moe Arnaiz, CEO of eMOBUS, a Telecom Association subject matter expert for enterprise mobility solutions.

To learn more about how your business can effectively migrate away from Blackberry to iPhones, iPads or Android devices contact your independent telecom agent or channel sales partner and ask them about the migration strategies suggested in this interview.

Following are the questions I posed:

Verizon Wireless is on Santa's "2011 Naughty List" for "Bill Shock"

By Dan Baldwin, Editor
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It looks like Verizon Wireles is going to get a bunch of coal in its stocking this year. The question is, "Does Verizon Wireless care?"

Hard to say.

Consumer Reports unveiled its 2011 Naughty & Nice Holiday List this week and Verizon Wireless made the list.

Following is what CR reported:

"The company tells the Federal Communications Commission that it voluntarily provides ample warning to customers who seem about to exceed their monthly allotment of minutes, messages, or data, so a mandatory rule that would make it issue such alerts isn't necessary.

But we caught Verizon doing -- and admitting to -- something else.

Two staffers who are Verizon customers recently were notified only after

Reduce Four Big IT Headaches With "WEM", our Wireless Expense Management Solution

By Dan Baldwin, Editor
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With having to manage my own IT (information technology) in my own company since I started it, I know for sure that any IT director's job headaches would be reduced if he or she could simply eliminate:

1. Problem people, and

2. Problem equipment 

But because there would be no need for IT directors if there were no problem people or equipment, IT directors are cursed with the headaches that come with people and equipment:

3. People using equipment, and

4. The costs associated with people using equipment

 

How to Eliminate the Trivial Wireless Device Headaches

Fortunately,  a bunch of mobile device experts who love nothing more than